Her name was Cynthia Powell, and, because she didn’t have a strong Liverpool accent, she was thought by the other students to be ‘a bit posh’ – an inaccurate assumption, but one that had been reinforced when, during her first year at college, she’d turned up every day wearing a tweed twinset and with her brown hair permed. She lived in Hoylake, which was on the Wirral peninsula on the other side of the Mersey – ‘over the water’ in Scouse-speak, and she was shy and quite different from all the self-confident city girls around her. By the beginning of her second year, however, she’d learned how to present herself as an art student. The twinset had been replaced with a pair of black velvet pants, and her hair had been dyed blonde. Looking like this, John couldn’t help but notice her.
The great fantasy woman for boys at the time was French actress Brigitte Bardot, who, with her pouty lips, had bared all (albeit in frustratingly gloomy shadow) in Roger Vadim’s film And God Created Woman – which John had been to see. Obligingly, the weekly tabloid newspaper Reveille had then published a free life-sized photograph of Brigitte in a state of mild undress, for which John had sent off, and which, despite Mimi, he had then stuck to the ceiling above his bed. By the summer term of 1959, as far as John was concerned, Cynthia Powell was his Brigitte Bardot fantasy made flesh and blood in Liverpool 8.
John’s abrasive confidence had seemed threatening to a girl from Hoylake, so the two had never spoken in their first year. But then John found himself relegated to the dreaded lettering class. Sitting behind her, he would call her ‘Miss Hoylake’, and ask first for a pencil, and then a rubber, because he never seemed to have either with him. Then he would mock-scold other boys with the warning, ‘No dirty jokes in front of Miss Powell.’ It was John’s way of showing her that he was interested.
Cynthia fancied him for his sheer attitude. She would later say that, in his drainpipe jeans and his uncle’s old overcoat, he looked like a bohemian, Teddy boy and comic all at once. And she didn’t know how to respond to a big-headed, loud-talking comedian.
He often took his guitar to college, and one afternoon while he was fooling around with it after class he jokily began to play and sing the old song ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ – looking directly at her. He could see that she was embarrassed, but also that she was enjoying it. They got together just before the summer term ended when a group of students were given permission to hold a party in the college. Couples were already jiving and smooching when John got there – late. Jeff Mahomed, who was going out with one of Cynthia’s friends, was encouraging: ‘She likes you, you know.’ Of course he knew.
Never much of a dancer, at some point John indicated the floor. ‘Do you want to go out with me?’ he shouted above the music.
Cynthia was taken by surprise. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m engaged to a fella in Hoylake,’ she replied. In truth she and a window cleaner called Barry weren’t actually engaged, but, after going out together for a couple of years, their relationship seemed to be heading that way.
Seeing it as a rejection, John immediately bit back. ‘I didn’t ask you to fucking marry me, did I!’ They danced on.
That was the start of their romance. When the party finished, some of the students made their way to Ye Cracke. Cynthia went with her girlfriends. At first, biding his time, John purposely ignored her. So Cynthia chatted to her pals, had a Guinness and a glass of cider, and, finally, assuming that John had been put off her, turned to leave.
He stopped her at the door with a joke about her being a nun, bought her another drink, and eventually took her outside and kissed her. ‘Stu has a room,’ he told her. Then, taking her hand, he led her down the street to buy some fish and chips, before they went along to the Georgian house in Percy Street where Stu shared a flat with several other students. John was, he would later say, ‘exultant at having picked her up’.
Cynthia would remember Stu’s home as a large room, with no curtains, no bed, and just a mattress on the floor which was surrounded by clothes, art materials, empty cigarette packets and books.
They made love for the first time that night. Then, getting dressed again, John hurried her down to the station for her to catch the last train back to Hoylake. He was in love.
A decade later, after they had divorced, he would deny that he’d ever felt that way about her, but his many love letters to her give the lie to that. His denials were just John, rewriting his own past. He was actually besotted with her. Everything important that he did in life, writing, playing, drawing his cartoons, love and hate, was done with an urgent, impulsive passion, as he lived, in his words, ‘on the spur of the moment’, and Cynthia was his new passion.
That they should have got together at the very end of the summer term was frustrating for both of them, because it meant they were soon going to be separated. Cynthia was going away with her mother to stay with relatives in the south of England, and, for the only time in his life, John was about to do some physical work.
For months he had been begging Mimi to help him buy a new guitar – the one that he had stolen in Manchester being of dubious quality – and finally she agreed. But only up to a point. He would have to do his bit, too, she insisted, by getting a summer job to help pay for it. So, when a college friend told him that there was work available for the two of them labouring for his father on a building site in a little village called Scarisbrick, he took it.
He should have looked at the map before he agreed. Scarisbrick was situated in the middle of the West Lancashire Plain, and to get there involved catching a bus the six miles to the centre of Liverpool, then taking a train from Exchange Station for twelve miles to the market town of Ormskirk. There his friend’s father would pick him up and drive him a further four miles out into the fields of Scarisbrick, where the work involved clearing the ground for a new waterworks. Basically, the job was with a pick axe and shovel, and John complained about it every day, praying, he would say, that the train would crash before it reached Ormskirk. He lasted six weeks, before he was sacked, as being ‘unsuitable’. He would be remembered by his fellow labourers as the boy who, when it was his turn to make the tea, put the kettle on the primus stove having forgotten to put any water in it. The result was that the kettle had a hole burnt right through its base.
That he lasted so long was extraordinary, but the wages enabled him to drag Mimi down to Frank Hessy’s music shop in Liverpool’s Whitechapel and buy his first electric guitar on hire purchase. It was a Hofner Club 40 semi-solid model and cost about £30 (that’s around £660 in today’s money). Mimi signed as his guarantor, insisting that John would have to pay all the instalments himself. Since he was usually short of money and the weekly allowance that Mimi gave him hardly covered his cigarettes, beer and bus fares, it seems unlikely that he always did.
The new guitar came just in time. The rump of the Quarry Men, John, Paul and George, had scarcely played together for months, in that a group without a drummer was hardly a band in the eyes of potential bookers. But an opening had just occurred at a Victorian mansion in the suburb of West Derby owned by Indian-born Mona Best and her husband Johnny – a well-known boxing promoter in Liverpool. As John would soon discover, Mona was a spirited, entrepreneurial woman who had struck on the idea of turning the basement of her home into a youth club called the Casbah Coffee Club, where her sons’ friends might meet. One of her sons was a good-looking, quiet boy called Peter.
It was George’s connections that led John and Paul to the Casbah. He’d now left school and was employed as a trainee electrician at a Liverpool department store, and, with no gigs for what remained of the Quarry Men, he’d been playing with other bands. One of them had been booked by Mona for the opening night of the Casbah, but the band members had fallen out, and now Mona needed another group quickly. George had the answer.
Naturally, Mona wanted to meet the replacements before they played, whereupon, learning that John was an art student, she instantly detailed him, Paul and George to finish off painting her new basement club. Their decorations of stars, a dragon, rainbows and a beetle, along with a profile of John drawn by Cynthia, are still there in what is now an English Heritage-listed building.
Joined by yet another guitarist who had his own amp, and without which the band couldn’t perform, the Quarry Men played at the Casbah almost every Saturday night for the next couple of months. Paul would remember those weeks as when ‘the Beatles really got started’ – although they didn’t yet call themselves the Beatles.
The Casbah often gets overlooked in the Beatles’ story, but it provides a snapshot of late Fifties teenage Britain – of how a big suburban home that had once been owned by the local Conservative Association became a club where two hundred teenagers, some arriving on their bikes, could go and listen to a local band . . . and where there was no alcohol and no drugs, just a frothy coffee machine, bottles of pop and crisps on sale. And where, if the Quarry Men weren’t playing, the Searchers or Gerry and the Pacemakers might be.
It was also the place where John and the other Quarry Men would first get to know Mona Best’s son, Pete.
Back at college in September, John and Cynthia resumed their relationship. She’d broken up with the ‘fella in Hoylake’ as soon as she’d become involved with John, but she was a pretty girl and inevitably other boys fancied her. That was something John couldn’t tolerate, and when, at a college dance, another student asked her to dance, he attacked him and had to be dragged away.
It was all very intense, as though, having won her, John was terrified of losing her. He had a phrase he liked to use as a joke – ‘I’m jealous of the mirror’. But his degree of possessiveness wasn’t a joke. As he was scared of the possibility of her being unfaithful with another boy, he was also jealous of her past with Barry, wanting to know every detail of everything she’d done with him.
Cynthia was a sweet young woman and extremely likeable who, while she never appeared to be particularly interested in rock music, would always defer to John’s opinion, intelligence and talent. But, as she would later wonder, was she some kind of emotional substitute for the mother he had so recently lost?
‘I was hysterical,’ John would say in 1966. ‘I was jealous of anyone she had anything to do with. I demanded absolute trust from her . . . I was neurotic, taking out all my frustrations out on her . . . There was something wrong with me.’
At one point his insecurities went too far. One night, Cynthia and a friend accepted a lift home in a car with a couple of boys. It was all innocent enough, but she made the mistake of telling John about it the next day. He followed her down the stairs at college into the Ladies and hit her, catching her face so hard that her head hit a wall.
She broke up with him immediately, and began avoiding him at college, although his eyes would find hers in class and in the canteen. The separation lasted for three months, until in the end he telephoned her, told her how sorry he was and begged her to come back to him. She did. He was still difficult, and his anger could, she said, be terrifying. But he was never, she told me, physically violent to her again during the years they were together.
‘It was terrible,’ he would admit of their time apart. ‘I couldn’t stand being without her.’
More than ten years later, after undergoing primal therapy, he would reflect on how many of his songs had been unknowingly autobiographical. A consideration of one of the earliest songs he ever wrote, ‘I Call Your Name’, might have been revealing. On the surface, it is an anguished, self-recriminatory lament about the loss of a girlfriend. Most boys understand that feeling. But might he have recognised that the lyrics were a reflection of his own desperate mood when Cynthia left him? ‘Was I to blame for being unfair?’ he asks in the song, as he details how he can’t sleep at night or carry on without his girlfriend.
Cynthia, like John, had recently lost a parent, her father having died from lung cancer a year earlier. So she understood the ache of loss. She also knew what she was getting into with John. ‘I fell in love with a bad boy, whom I knew to be a bad boy,’ she told me. ‘John wasn’t the best, but he wasn’t the worst. But if my father had still been alive, he wouldn’t have got past the front door of our house.’
As it happened, when John did visit her house in Hoylake – which, despite her apparent poshness to Liverpudlians, she would describe as ‘a modest semi about half the size of Mendips’ – her worries that John would upset her mother proved unfounded. He was charm itself. Her two older brothers liked him, too.
Her own visit to meet Mimi was more fraught. ‘She was friendly but cool,’ she said. ‘Regal, almost,’ although she served them chips and egg for their evening meal.
‘Don’t worry about Mimi,’ John told her as he took her to the bus stop after her first visit. ‘If I like you, she’ll like you too.’
Cynthia wasn’t so sure about that. Later on, though, she came to see that Mimi’s froideur hadn’t been personal. Mimi just ‘didn’t think any girl was good enough for her boy’, she said.
The heat often goes out of teenage relationships after a couple of months. But it didn’t with John and Cynthia. He would make up love poems about her, send her love letters, and draw funny little cartoons all through the next term and for years after.
Traditionally the art college ended the autumn term with a pantomime, and in 1959 it was Cinderella, in which John made, not only his writing debut, as one of the play’s two authors, but his acting one as well. Cast as the Ugly Sisters, and dressed in a pair of pink corsets, a blue velvet dress, a straw hat and blue feather decorations which had been given to them by life class model June Furlong, he and Jeff Mahomed mugged their way through some cod Chaucerian dialogue.
And then it was Christmas, and John drew a card for Cynthia that was festooned in hearts and kisses. ‘Our first Christmas,’ he wrote, and then added, ‘I love you, yes, yes, yes.’
As Cynthia would later realise, with a change of pronoun and a more casual vernacular, it was a message that four and a half years later he would turn into one of the Beatles’ biggest hits.